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Meditations 



on THE 



Essence of Christianity 



BY 



/ 

R. LAIRD COLLIER, D.D. 










BOSTON 

ROBERTS BROTHERS 

1876 

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By Roberts Brothers, 

1876. 



Cambridge : 
Press of John Wilson 6° Son. 



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" Pain's furnace-heat within me quivers ; 
God's breath upon the flame doth blow ; 
And all my heart in anguish shivers 
And trembles at the fiery glow : 
And yet I whisper : 'As God will! ' 
And in his hottest fire stand still. 

He comes, and lays my heart all heated 

On the hard anvil, minded so, 
Into his own fair shape to beat it 

With his great hammer, blow on blow : 
And yet I whisper: 'As God will!' 
And at his heaviest blows hold still. 

He takes my softened heart and beats it ; 

The sparks fly off at every blow ; 
He turns it o'er and o'er and heats it, 
And lets it cool, and makes it glow : 
And yet I whisper : 'As God will ! ' 
And in his mighty hand hold still. 

"Why should I murmur 1 for the sorrow 

Thus only longer-lived would be ; 
Its end may come — and will to-morrow, 
When God has done his work in me : 
So I say trusting : 'As God will I ' 
And, trusting to the end, hold still. 

He kindles for my profit purely, 

Affliction's glowing, fiery brand ; 
And all his heaviest blows are surely 
Inflicted by a Father's hand : 

So I say praising : ' As God will ! ' 
And hope in him and suffer still." 



TO 




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DEDICATE this little book to Thee; 
not to thy Memory, but to thy Presence. 

Whilst yet the Heavenly Glory was filling and 
flooding the chamber of death, and thy Spirit, quite 
upon the confines of the Eternal World, held the 
credential of prophecy, thou didst foretell my utter 
loneliness and dreariness without thy bodily pres- 
ence, and didst promise that thy Real Presence 
should abide with me. 

Thy dying words have been fulfilled. No day 
has come without the loneliness and the dreariness, 
but I have gone to duty when it has been oh, so 



8 Dedication. 



hard, and oh, so dark, because of the assurance of 
thy Presence even in these hard and dark places. 

We have had sweet communion upon the 
" things of the Spirit," and thou dost well know 
the thoughts, and art familiar with the sentences 
of these " Meditations." 

Whatever in this book is untrue, or uncertain, 
or incomplete, is mine ; whatever is true, or noble 
or helpful, is thine. 



R. Laird Collier. 



London, February 24, 1876. 




CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introduction 13 

I. 
The Only God 23 

II. 

The Real Christ 41 

III. 
The Known Spirit 61 

IV. 

The Right Religion 81 

V. 

The Sure Hell 101 

VI. 
The True Heaven 121 



INTRODUCTION 



" Teach how, yet, what here we know, 
To the unknown leads the way, 
As the light that, faint and low, 

Prophesies consummate day: 
How the little arc before us 
Proves the perfect circle o'er us: — 

How the marr'd unequal scheme 
That on all sides here we meet, 

Either is a lawless dream, 

Or must somewhere be complete ; — 

Where or when, if near or distant, 

Known but to the One Existent. 

— He is. We meanwhile repair 
From the noise of human things 

To the fields of larger air, 
To the shadow of his wings : 

Listening for his message only 

In the wild with Nature lonely. ' ' 




FTER reading Feuerbach's Essence of 
Christianity ; a Biichner's Force and Mat- 
ter $ and other books of like tendencies, 
I was led to look into my own heart to see if my 
faith in Christ and Christianity had been either 
destroyed or disturbed. I meant to make honest 
work of it. The forms in which I had held the 
" Old Faith " had in many cases been modified 
and in some wholly given up. But the "things 
essential," " the things which remain," became 
more real and more dear to me as I disencum- 
bered them of their traditional and conventional 



a. Das Wesen des Christenthums, von Ludwig Feuerbach. 
Leipzig, 1850. 
0. Kraft und Stoff, von Ludwig Biichner. Leipzig, 1874. 

2 



18 Introduction. 



phraseology, and consented to conform their out- 
ward expression with modern consciousness, and 
the original and permanent spirit of Christianity 
itself. Christianity is real ; it has permanent con- 
tents ; these are the most absolute ideas of spirit, 
life, duty, and aspiration, of which we know. 
Learning does not wage warfare on these sweet 
and sacred intuitions and sentiments of the soul, 
but it does, and must urge ceaseless and successful 
opposition to the superstitious and incredible 
forms in which they have frequently been held. 

These "Meditations," then, grew out of my 
readings and inquiries, and were originally in- 
tended to meet, in some measure, many objections 
to Christianity, half formed if not wholly accepted, 
by serious and devout minds. However, I have 
deemed it best to shorten and simplify as much as 
I well could, these chapters, and thereby to seek 
for this little book a much wider reading and use- 
fulness. 

It does not assume, therefore, to be a critique 
upon such works as The Essence of Christianity 



Introduction. 19 



and Force and Matter, although in many instances 
I use the thoughts and occasionally the language 
of these books, sometimes to show how they fall in 
with the truth of Christ, and sometimes to expose 
their fallacies and sophistries. 



I have tried to find in my own heart the reason 
of my faith — to make it plain to myself that there 
was reality in religion, and enduring significance 
and saving grace in Christianity ; and I here attempt 
to state the grounds of my faith rather as I feel 
them, than as I can put them into consecutive argu- 
ments. Logic, in its outward forms, is the vehicle 
of conviction and truth to comparatively few minds, 
whilst most are led to their deepest and enduring 
sentiments through their spiritual perceptions. 



We cannot hold longer, against the New Light, 
the Old Faith in its old form. The Old Faith 



20 Introduction. 



cannot perish, because it is real and true and good. 
But it will and must take its own form, and in the 
providence of God that form will be adequate, 
reasonable, and after the fashion of the times. 

Heretofore, many have taken alarm when the 
perishable has perished and when the symbol has 
been proven to be superstitious, as though religion 
and worship would cease in the earth. But religion 
and worship have survived these changes in the 
outward dogmas and methods, and Christianity is 
more real and helpful by reason of the pulling down 
of these obstructions and the crumbling away of all 
authoritative and ecclesiastical interpretations. 



Logic and reason must be met and satisfied. 
Christianity cannot survive — no form of religion 
can survive — which ignores their functions, and 
claims. But religion is not based in these and does 
not make its first, certainly not its final appeal to 
them. 



Introduction, 21 



There is some knowledge greater than any 
speech, too subtle for any definitions. These 
" things of the spirit ,! we must " feel after ' : if 
haply we may find them. 

If the spirit of man find God and can catch 
foregieams of immortality, this spirit will readily 
and sweetly make friends of reason and the logical 
understanding. Superstition has confused reason 
and confounded logic, and when these have found 
place and courage, they have entered vigorous 
protest. 



Christianity is sufficient to itself. When its 
temporary and casual forms become an offence to 
fine sentiment and common sense, they must give 
way — die out. Leave it free, spiritually free, free 
as Christ himself was free, and each age and each 
civilization will give Christianity eyes and voice, 
hands and feet, as it shall please God. 



I 



THE ONLY GOD 



" But neither passion nor sorrow I hear in this rhythmic 
steady course, 

Only the movement resistless and strong of some all-per- 
vading force; 

The one universal life which moves the whole of the outward 
plan, 

Which throbs in winds, and waters, and flowers, in insect, 
and bird, and man. 

O, would that the unknown finer touch which makes us other 

than those, 
Did not hold us so far asunder in soul, from their harmony 

and repose! 
The self-same fountain doth life and growth to us and to 

them impart, 
But only at moments we taste and know the peace which is 

Nature's heart. • 

And yet it may be that long, long hence, when aeons of 

effort have pass'd, 
We shall come, not blindly impelled, but free, to the orbit of 

order at last, 
And a finer peace shall be wrought out of pain than the stars 

in their courses know ! — 
Ah me ! but my soul is in sorrow till then, and the feet of 

the years are slow! " 




OD is Spirit. This much we can say of 
God with great assurance of faith, only 
because we can say it through our spirits. 
Because our spirits affirm there is a God we believe 
in God. Not because there is a tradition of God ; 
not for the reason that the Bible, and the cate- 
chism, and the Church have all taught God and 
about God ; nor yet for the reason that it is con- 
ventional to believe in God ; nor yet for the reason 
that, upon the whole, it gives us less anxiety of 
mind and less perplexity of logic to accept the 
doctrine of God, do we give our credence to it. 
But we believe in God because our spirits affirm 
Spirit. He offers some measure of insult to the in- 
tegrity of his own spirit, who attempts to make the 
existence of God the subject of intellectual proof. 



30 The Only God. 



To try to prove some things is to demonstrate 
unbelief in them. My inquiry is in the interest 
of faith, so I have no formal arguments to offer to 
bolster up that which the only tendency of such 
arguments is to destroy. 

When a man's spirit is crying out for the living 
God, to offer him a logical demonstration of God's 
existence, is like kindling a fire of straw to warm 
a man shivering in a Siberian frost. 

The only logic of God is on this wise, — God is 
God ; because we cannot prove him to be, we must 
acknowledge what we cannot deny, accept what 
we cannot refuse. Not to believe in some God is 
insanity, every sane man's soul refers itself to that 
which is eternal and infinite, as time and space are 
the symbols of something more real than time and 
space. 

Disquisitions upon God are usually apologies for 
the God defined. Theodicy is a science by which 
glory is ascribed to a being who, brought into the 
plane of humanity, would be called unfair and 
cruel ; that is, if any man should do what church 



The Only God. 31 



theology says God has done and is doing, he would 
be justly called a human monster. Most sermons 
to which we have listened upon the goodness of 
God go to show that it is a great wonder that God 
is no worse, and that herein is ground for rejoicing, 
that, whilst God has made it probable — the most 
likely of all things — that most of the beings 
whom he has made and put into a disadvantageous 
set of circumstances will go into final and irrevo- 
cable perdition, it is a great mercy that there is 
any chance for the likeliest of us to escape it. 

When a man is satiated he may not inquire 
whether there is food in the larder ; when a child 
is content with his toys, he may not notice the 
presence or absence of Iris mother from the house. 
When a man is hungry, then he wants to know 
that there is " a haddock in the press," as the Scotch 
would say. When the child has notched his finger 
the bleeding frightens him, and he rushes to his 
mother. 

Our hearts are not always on the watch for the 
coming and going of God, nor need our lips be like 



32 The Only God. 



the dial in a gold-broker's room, telling the exact 
state of the spiritual market ; but when we get very 
hungry, or our hearts get full of grief, so that we 
are clean undone, we cry out for our God. We 
may have been taught to call Him Jove or Jesus, 
or even Mary ; still he or she is our only refuge in 
distress, the shadow of a great rock in a weary 
land. 

I cannot hold controversy with an Atheist; he 
has me wholly at a disadvantage, he has the first 
affirmation that — "there is no God." 

I cannot prove to him the second on my part, 
that there is. He can deride my superstition ; I 
dare not sneer at him. The infidel can sneer, the 
believer would undo his faith by the same tactics. 

When a man says he does not believe in God, I 
am sure he is either very fortunate or very unfor- 
tunate. He has never been hungry for Gocl, never 
thirsted for living waters, never known the bleed- 
ings of a vicarious and grief-stricken soul, so he 
has been fortunate in this. Dare I say so? He 
counts it fortune. I say in reality, he has been 



The Only God. 33 



most unfortunate — he has not yet breathed the 
breath of life. 

The ocean sighs, it never sings : the winter winds, 
when they come, moan, never clap their hands in 
joy. All winds, too, come from heaven, so we can- 
not mistake the key to which its music is all set. 
Men will make glad music on a harp, but put it in 
one's window and let nature play upon its strings 
and the music is all minor, sombre, sad, sighing, 
wailing. 

But this is the highest life. The multitude re- 
joice together, the saints dwell in solitary places. 
All nature is in the agony of redemption, — it is 
agony, — man redeems himself by agony; but there 
are bright clouds, and glory unspeakable, all about 
the grief of struggle. 

So this man who says there is no God is a poor 
unfortunate brother, who has never felt the need 
of God ; and, it is strange to say, these people are 
the product of civilization — the savages all have 
gods ; the props of what we call civilization take 
the place now and then of God, only for a time 



34 The Only God, 



however ; they rot in the earth and the spirit falls, 
only to get upon surer foundation. God will claim 
the heart, and only comes when man has no other 
resource or help. So He magnifies himself into 
God. If one could dispose of Him like a problem 
of mathematics, or make a telescopic examination 
of Him, then He would not be God at all. He 
is God, because He is unsearchable, and His ways 
past finding out. God is not only a fact, but a 
light ; not only a truth, but a life. 

" Come in the glory of Thine excellence, 
Rive the dense gloom with wedges of clear light, 
And let the shimmer of Thy chariot wheels 
Burn through the cracks of night — so slowly, Lord, 
To lift myself to Thee with hands of toil, 
Climbing the slippery cliff of unheard prayer. 
Lift up a hand among my idle days — 
One beckoning finger, — I will cast aside 
The clogs of earthly circumstance, and run 
Up the broad highways where the countless worlds 
Sit ripening in the summer of Thy love." 

The history of the God-idea helps us but little 
towards a definition, for this is a history of gods. 
The gods of the peoples are as dissimilar as the 
races and nations themselves. Not only has each 



The Only God. 35 



nation had its God, but eacli century, I may add, 
each individual. In tracing the development of 
this idea in the old scriptures of the world, we 
trace simply the dominant characteristics of the 
times and peoples themselves. As we approximate 
the beginning of history, and get back into the 
times when the aspect of nature was terrible, the 
being presumed to be the author of nature, or 
the master of nature, is terrible, — the awful, the 
sublime, and majestic. 

When the habits of the people became pastoral 
and peaceful, God became a good shepherd ; and 
when friendship became the bond of the social 
structure, and the home became a sanctity, God 
became a friend, a father, and a brother. 

An exception must be made in the interest 
of history, which I cannot stop to make in the 
interest of dogmatism. Christianity, in its essence, 
unifies and fixes, as I believe, the one fundamental 
sentiment that makes God of any, and therefore 
so much, value to men — his imminence, only this 
makes God real at all ; that he is not afar off, but 



36 . The Only God. 



here and now ; not so much a creator of worlds as 
a re-creator of men ; not a spirit, but the Spirit of 
all, in all, and through all. Language, when un- 
perverted and left to tell its own story, tells the 
truth. The catechisms and theologic treatises result 
in the unity of conception, by what they call attri- 
butes. Men attribute certain things to God, and the 
highest of all these conceptions is God. 

The most we know about God in a technical 
way is what the most god-like men have told us ; 
and here we beg all claims to definition, in the 
use of the term "god-like," for if we disclaim all 
original idea of God, we cannot know what is like 
God. But the highest, purest, noblest ideal of 
being we call God, and the men who approach that 
in their lives, we call divine men. Then it is 
no great wonder that a superstitious age should 
have called such an exceptional symbol of that 
conception as Jesus was — God, and that a super- 
stitious church should perpetuate the claim. There 
is no little human vanity in this ; to see God and 
make God human is to make humanity God, and 



The Only God. 37 



this is a great exaltation of men, for you and I are 
humanity. 

The idea of humanity is incomplete without the 
idea of God ; humanity refers itself to something 
to which it is responsible, and so has always wor- 
shipped — always will. 

And to this end definite ideas have never been 
essential, because men have worshipped where 
ideas of God have not been the same. God lights 
up the prayer-book of the Jew and of the Chris- 
tian, he escapes confusing phrases, and answers to 
the call of the needy heart. The primitive man of 
the primitive forests beats out a dolorous strain 
upon the rudest instrument — it is worship; the 
Christian gives up his spirit to the gorgeous ritu- 
alism of organ, trained musicians, incense, and 
ceremonial by priest and attendants — that is also 
worship. The thing essential is a hungry and 
thirsty soul. When we have put together unity, 
eternity, intelligence, beneficence, power, and im- 
minence, we have affirmed of God the highest ideal 
that the most lucid and elevated spirits of the race 



38 The Only God. 



have believed and felt. These qualities of being, 
when finite, constitute the highest man, when pro- 
jected into the infinite, are God. 

Then that worship which lifts man towards this 
ideal and brings him into communion, reverence, 
awe, and love, is the one best helpfulness. To 
break away from this is death and despair, before 
it becomes death and hell. To breathe this air of 
worship is to turn the spirit of the sick to the 
open window where perfumes and invigoration are 
wafted in. 

Then I conclude that only that doubt damns 
which has in it no element of devoutness and 
aspiration. When a man says in his intellect 
" There is no God," I still trust his heart will 
batter away at his intellect day and night, until 
the heart makes the intellect see visions, — for 
really there is a higher nature in every man which 
enfolds the intellect, and takes it captive. There 
comes a time, I trust, in every man's life, when no 
intervention of cold speculation can shut out the 
need of God from the heart ; and if it occur that 



The Only God. 39 



man in the dreary winter days is a pessimist, we 
will believe that when the first spring days come 
back he will be an optimist, the doubt will succumb 
to faith, and this highest and truest nature will 
affirm there is a God, who will answer the man 
that cries unto Him : there is no deaf heaven, and 
no vain prayer. The hearing God will answer 
" not always according to the haste of the praying 
child, but surely according to the calm course of 
His own infinite law of love." 



II 



THE REAL CHRIST 



Like a cradle rocking, rocking, 

Silent, peaceful, to and fro, 
Like a mother's sweet looks dropping 

On the little face below, 
Hangs the green earth, swinging, turning, 

Jarless, noiseless, safe and slow; 
Falls the light of God's face bending 

Down and watching us below. 

And as feeble babes that suffer, 

Toss and cry, and will not rest, 
Are the ones the tender mother 

Holds the closest, loves the best, — 
So when we are weak and wretched, 

By our sins weighed down, distressed, 
Then it is that God's great patience 

Holds us closest, loves us best. 

O great heart of God ! whose loving 

Cannot hindered be nor crossed; 
Will not weary, will not even 

In our death itself be lost — 
Love divine ! of such great loving, 

Only mothers know the cost — 
Cost of love, which all love passing, 

Gave a Son to save the lost. 

Saxe Holm. 



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HAVE little hope of disposing any mind 
to greater faith in Christ: indeed, this 
is not my aim. The wavelets of rose 
odours are not fit subject for intellectual speculation 
and discussion. The philosophy of one's love for 
one's mother, or the magic power of a memento, 
cannot very well be defined : to attempt definition 
is to unsanctify ; here assertion is vulgarity, some- 
times hypocrisy. 

Then, if my words seem without logical connec- 
tion, I beg to attribute this to the subject I treat, 
and ask to be followed — not so much in thought 
as in heart — from the verbal form to the spiritual 
import, where I promise some degree of sequence. 
1 have a strong persuasion that I may be led to 



48 The Real Christ. 

say somewhat to strengthen faith in the faith of 
Christ. To have faith in Christ is something, 
though very little : to have the faith of Christ is 
every thing, — this is to have heaven and God. 

Here is a life whose passion was truth, whose 
pleasure was purity, whose product was peace. 
We partake of these holy delights in some measure 
when we partake of the faith of his life. Christ 
had great faculty for leading men to these, — to re- 
ligion, to God, and so was a mediator between man 
and God. Not a mediator between man and himself, 
for he came not to show us himself, but to show us 
the Father. So faith in God is the faith of Christ ; 
the very mission of the Master is hindered and 
defeated when faith stands still in him. This is 
obstruction, not mediation. If this spiritual instru- 
ment stops the vision by the murkiness of its own 
lenses, this obscurity is simply the dust that ages 
of false and scholastic speculation have accumu- 
lated. This brushed away, and the spiritual eye 
is unhindered, ay, helped to see that which, with- 
out it, it could see not at all, or at least as afar off, 



The Real Christ. 49 



minified, a speck clothed in haziness. There is a 
sense in which, therefore, faith in Christ hinders 
and annuls the faith of Christ. 

The view which makes of the Christ a substitute 
is therefore only a false and vicious view, whether 
it regards the action of his life in either direction 
toward man or God. He is a substitute for nei- 
ther ; he is a mediator of both. 

The eye of the Deity needs no medium, his heart 
none. There is in the loving Father no antithetical 
disposition toward his children. He was as near 
to Adam as to a Kempis, only a Kempis knew his 
nearness as Adam could not. The Christ became 
a mediator of the knowledge, not of the fact. 

One form of Christian speculation has made the 

sufferings of Christ have reference to God. That 

in some way Christ made it possible for God to 

relieve Himself of a moral difficulty; that Christ 

made it possible for God to be just in Himself, and 

merciful toward His children. We, on our part, 

cannot see in this speculation any element of 

reality ; to us, it is false and harmful, — false to 

4 



50 The Real Christ. 

theodicy, and harmful to morality. It calls some- 
thing justice in God which we should call injustice 
in man. Then this speculation is wholly a needless 
one. If the sufferings of Christ in any wise modi- 
fied either the disposition or enactment of God, 
this is not our part or share in the matter. 

We know that the holy life of Christ, its abso- 
lute purity and beauty, the holy death of Christ, 
the seeds of which were planted in the voluntari- 
ness with which he took upon his heart the suffering 
and sin of the whole world, are an atonement ; they 
bring a moral power into the world — a new kind 
of power — a new current of life which moves men 
to pity and mercy. 

The real Christ is the law of the conscience made 
flesh ; this law is the ideal God, and His will ; then 
" God manifest in the flesh " is Christ. 

Whether any human being in actuality ever 
realized this law in himself has no essential rele- 
vancy to our discussion ; the effort to get rid of 
this conjecture and belief imposes a tedious mental 
and greater moral task upon him who attempts it. 



The Real Christ. 51 

It is much easier to accept Christ as the demon- 
stration of God, than to deny it : this latter brings 
great perplexity in every way, for the universal 
Christian consciousness has invested Christ with 
this ideal, if in himself he is not such ; and so far 
criticism has made sad work of separating between 
the intrinsic and extraneous reality, — both are 
real. 

Christianity has succeeded in giving to its vota- 
ries a visible, living, personal law 5 in the Christ of 
its Gospels. If in himself he was not this realiza- 
tion, the Christian thought has invested him with 
it. There is in humanity a need of this personifi- 
cation of the law of the conscience. Plato, the 
intellectual Messiah, said of God, " I have sought 
Him, but He cannot be found ; though every ray 
of the sun became my torch, darkness has fallen 
around me." 

Christ, the spiritual Messiah, said, " Blessed are 
the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 

This ideal in Christ is not less lofty after all 
these centuries of partial appreciation and follow- 



52 The Real Christ. 

ing. Just as the Christian world moves up in the 
scale towards human perfection, this ideal Christ 
moves up in the scale of being. If, then, men have 
invested Christ with a quality of divinity which, 
in fact, he did not possess, we probably shall never 
know where to draw the line between that with 
which God endowed him, and that with which 
loving disciples have invested him. 

There is a beautiful and spiritual sense, if withal 
somewhat mystical, in which the mediative Christ 
is a God manifested as man, and a man manifested 
as God. 

Any abstract truth is difficult of comprehension : 
symbols and figures of speech frequently make the 
illustration of a truth plain, which otherwise would 
be obscure or unthinkable ; we know what life is, 
because we know what a man is, or a flower is. 
When the abstract word " life " is used, we know 
what is meant, because we think of life in man, 
or life in a flower, or the life of something; we 
think of eye or limb in activity, we think of root 
or branch. 



The Real Christ. 53 

God is spirit or God is life ; we think of spirit 
and life as active in Christ. So in this way Christ 
is God, known personally. 

We ma'y know a person by hearsay, or we may 
know an author by his writings ; but if he be such 
an one as we long to know, there is an unfilled and 
aching void until we have seen him face to face, 
until we have known him personally. 

" And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt 
among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of 
the only-begotten of the Father full of grace and 
truth." 

The Word has been spoken. Christ is God speak- 
ing or personally communicating himself to man. 
Christ is the blessed certainty that God is what we 
wish Him to be. Indeed, I am ready to say that 
the idea of a personal God, dissociated from the idea 
of a corporeal God, is unthinkable. History con- 
firms this view. Only those religions which hold 
to the possibility of the divine incarnation hold to 
the belief of the divine personality. Christ is God 
made flesh; that is, Christ is God become a person. 



54 The Real Christ. 

God, to be of any conscious helpfulness to man, 
must have a human expression ; that is, to sym- 
pathize with suffering, must be the subject of it. 
So it is beautifully said of Christ : " He is touched 
with a feeling of our infirmity." " He also suffered 
being tempted, wherefore he is able to succour them 
that are tempted." 

It is not only superficial but very mistaken to 
say that Christianity reveals three divine personali- 
ties. It is exactly the meaning of Christianity to 
deny this, and to illustrate that there is one per- 
sonal God, revealed in the one man Jesus, who so 
is the real Christ. 

The Holy Ghost is a term of purely arbitrary use 
in the Scriptures, as the gift of the Father, or of 
the Son, or of both, but usually signifying simply 
the Spirit of God. 

The Olympian gods fulfilled the wants of the 
imagination by the element of splendour. Christi- 
anity fulfils the wants of the heart by the element 
of sympathy. The life of Jove was that of the 
mighty ; the life of Jesus was that of the lowly. 



The Real Christ. 5b 

The love of any thing noble and beautiful is the 
gate to heaven. So a child, a woman, a man, may 
be in some sense a mediator. To love Christ — in 
himself child, woman, and man — is to dispart the 
clouds, and let us into the inner glory. Only think 
of the dreariness of that child's soul who said he 
had no recollection of ever having been kissed. 
This spirit through which had swept only the 
chilling winds of the world's neglect could have no 
sense of heaven's love and watclifulness. What a 
revelation the life of Christ is to such an one ! 
Where such an one loves Christ what a divine 
transfiguration ! 

If, now, I should pass away from these, to me, 
most holv and delightful reflections to formal def- 
initions and dogmas, it would only be to repeat 
the sorry way the world has had of substituting 
stubble for the food of angels. It would be to give 
up certainty for uncertainty, knowledge for igno- 
rance, faith for doubt. 

I know nothing of Christ's pre-existence, or his 
eternal sonship. I cannot understand any trinity 



56 The Heal Christ. 

in God, or any need in God of appeasing Himself, 
or satisfying any demands of His law. I shrink 
from these poor frightful unrealities, as one who hav- 
ing known the communion of angels, would shrink 
from the fellowship of demons. I know nothing 
whatever of the supernatural. We find Christ just 
where our devotion and our faith should consent 
to leave him, in the plane of nature and humanity. 

I cannot understand any thing about his miracu- 
lous birth, or his miraculous death ; it is enough 
for me to hold the beautiful thought, that he was 
begotten of God, and that when he had fulfilled his 
days, he went home to his Father. To express this 
elevated conception, his loving biographers have 
thrown strange language about it, and so clothed 
it in purity and glory, that some have lost sight of 
the spiritual thought in the poetical imagery. 

Though his mother was never so chaste and holy, 
her dear son never dishonoured her. She gave him 
a body ; but his spiritual features were those of his 
Father. He came into the world not to show us 
his mother, but God. 



The Real Christ. 57 

He is, so far as we know, the finest flower of 
humanity ; its son — its best son, and its best be- 
loved son. Best and best beloved because so much 
like his Father ; so much like Him that we know of 
no other son of whom we can say, " he is just like 
his Father, the very image of Him, he reminds us of 
his Father." Yes, this is the one wonderful fact 
about Jesus, he reminds the world of God. To 
manifest God, the spirit of God must be in him. 

The Father's life has gone out into the life of 
His son, as blood passes from father to son, to give 
its own quality of temperament and physique. So 
Christ does something more than manifest God — 
he demonstrates God. 

The real Christ may not answer exactly to the 
portraiture as painted severally by the four in- 
spired artists of the Gospels. They did so well, 
that the debt of gratitude which we owe them we 
can never pay. Especially the loving John, who 
caught a glimpse of his Master's inner life and 
glory, and so reflected it that the strength of his 
colours have lost nothing with age. 



58 The Real Christ. 

The image of the Christ we have is so like God, 
and yet so like man, it serves well the divine and 
needful purpose of mediator between the two. 
Indeed, we never knew how very alike human and 
divine nature were, until the race saw Christ ; so 
that having seen him we dare conclude that nature 
itself is a unit, — not two, but one ; one in Christ 
Jesus. He fulfils the idea of both. We have no 
higher idea of man than Christ is, and no higher 
idea of God than Christ has revealed. He was the 
revelation himself, finitely: the essence of this is 
in him, the expanse of this is God. 

Indeed, Christ seemed " empty of all save God." 
He was of God, according to his measure, which, 
nevertheless, had the limitations of humanity and 
finiteness. He was all that a perfect man could be. 
In his perfection he was like God, in his limitation 
he was like man. 

The world has never been left without mediums 
and mediators of approach to God. The highest 
spirits of the East have got very near to the heart 
of God, by getting very near to the hearts of their 



The Meal Christ, 59 

own prophets. Those who have stood close to 
Buddha have stood close to God. Himself high 
up in the heavens, he has lifted many to his side, 
and to God's. 

But his image has fallen upon the world ob- 
liquely. He gives light to a nation. Rising in the 
East, this sun stands still. Christ is the light of 
the world. Rising in the East, this sun has girdled 
the earth, and lighted up all zones with its own 
splendours. As the world has not yet conceived a 
more perfect pattern, it has not asked for one, and 
will not whilst it remains true as now that man 
knows no holy desire unsatisfied, no spiritual want 
unmet, no immortal aspiration unfulfilled in Christ 
our Lord. 



~^5 



Ill 



THE KNOWN SPIRIT 



Good tidings every day, 

God's messengers ride fast, 

We do not hear one half they say, 

There is such noise on the highway, 

Where we must wait while they ride past. 

Their banners blaze and shine 
"With Jesus Christ's dear name, 
And story, how by God's design 
He saves us, in His love divine, 
And lifts us from our sin and shame. 

Their music fills the air, 
Their songs sing all of Heaven ; 
Their ringing trumpet peals declare 
What crowns to souls who fight and dare, 
And win, shall presently be given. 

Their hands throw treasures round 
Among the multitude. 
Xo pause, no choice, no count, no bound, 
Xo questioning how men are found, 
If they be evil or be good. 

But all the banners bear 

Some words we cannot read ; 

And mystic echoes in the air, 

Which borrow from the songs no share, 

In sweetness all the songs exceed. 



And of the multitude, 

No man but in his hand 

Holds some great gift misunderstood, 

Some treasure, for whose use or good 

His ignorance sees no demand. 

These are the tokens lent 

By immortality ; 

Birth-marks of our divine descent, 

Sureties of ultimate intent, 

God's Gosr^el of Eternity. 

Good tidings every day, 
The messengers ride fast ; 
Thanks be to God for al] they say ; 
There is such noise on the highway, 
Let us keep still while they ride past. 



Saxe Holm. 








HERE is some one holy thing between the 
heart of every man and Gocl — the death 
of a mother, or the birth of a child, or 
some experience more occult than either of these, 
that serves as a point of confluence between the 
infinite Spirit and the finite spirit. This fact, what- 
ever it may be, is the Secret Place of the Most 
High, and the Holy of Holies for the human spirit. 
It is that point in the life of each when life itself 
ceases to flow in, and begins to ebb out, — that 
is, when life is no longer sacred to the individual 
for the purposes of the individual, but sacred for 
the universal life of the world. In Jesus Christ 
this point was just that at which he became the 
medium of contact between God and man ex- 
pressed in the phrase, "I in them, and Thou in 



me. 



>j 



68 The Known Spirit. 

That which is intellectually unknown in God, is 
intellectually unknown to man. The Spirit of God 
witnesses to the spirit of man, and it is the most 
singular felicity in the relation of the infinite Spirit 
to men, that He never leaves Himself without this 
witness. The consciousness of it is seldom con- 
tinuous. It is compared to the wind which comes 
and goes, we cannot always tell whence or whither. 
We hear its music, as of the "still small voice," as 
it touches sweetly the chords of life, deepest life, in 
us, and then passes on its way. The memory of 
its music it consents to leave with us, and this is 
the blessed surety and earnest of the Spirit. 

I have already said this has some association in 
the life of every man, and I cannot believe that 
there can be an exception to this custom of the 
Spirit's operation. Man having come out from 
God, seeks to go back to God : had he been born 
of material nature, the grave would satisfy all his 
aspirations, he would be content to go to that from 
which he came ; and when the mother earth threw 
around him her secure and strong arms, this couch 



The Knoivn Spirit. 69 

would be the final peace and rest. Indeed man 
would know of nothing, and dream of nothing 
higher than his own origin : born of earth, being of 
the quality of the earth, he would be of the earth, 
earthy. But no man has been wholly left without 
the reminiscence of Iris original nature, so his heart 
and his flesh cry out for the living God. 

The world itself, and its treatment of him, may 
seldom give hints of his origin, but now and then 
he will meet a man and receive a kindness which 
will remind him of God. 

The Spirit of God works greatly and incessantly 
until it finds a lodgement in each heart — some soil 
is fertile, and some is sterile. The fruit of the 
Spirit is early seen in some lives, and will ulti- 
mately be seen in all lives. " The latest fruit will 
ripen at last." 

The man may not always know when he enters 
this "whispering gallery" of the Spirit, and just 
at what point he first stood within this " holy of 
holies." He knows a new element has entered into 
his life, when or how he cannot determine some- 



70 The Known Sjnrit. 

times even for himself — there are some things so 
solemnly sacred, that they cannot be made matter 
of even mental record. Indeed, the Spirit will not 
tarry for the slow movements of chronology. With 
God a thousand years are but as one day, and 
sometimes one day is as a thousand years ; it is the 
nature of the thing that gives it significance, not 
the time required in doing it. Time is like space ; 
there is so much of it, that for only a little section 
can we find names, such as day, week, month, year, 
century, and so on ; as we say earth, moon, sun ; 
and when we get through our list, already so long 
for the memory, the rest is nameless. 

Few men abandon themselves to this call of the 
Spirit, but most men know of it ; I do not mean to 
say that there are not some who are so open-eyed 
and free-hearted that they know the exact instant 
when this angel enters in, and when it folds its 
wings in peace and gives rest. 

It is usually the way of the Spirit to make his 
presence felt most when it is most needed. When 
the children of integrity were in the fiery furnace, 



The Known Spirit. 71 

the form of the Fourth was seen. This was just 
when they needed God ; it was their extremity. 

It is a psychical fact, physicians tell us, that it 
is the rarest thing to find a patient afraid of death 
when just at its door. When one gets so far out of 
this world as to catch glimpses of the other, that 
other is revealed as very beautiful and full of 
welcomes. 

The last impress which the spirit gives to the 
flesh is very lovely. We often remark a spiritual 
expression, — an expression of peace and tranquil- 
lity, — upon the face of a corpse which the subject 
of it seldom wore in life. 

God is very good to permit the spirit to see what 
He has in reserve for it, and then to give it time 
to write this upon the face of death, so that the 
memory of death is pleasant, when the fear of it is 
gone. 

When man is sufficient of himself, then he can- 
not believe his sufficiency is of God ; when man is 
a god to himself, he wants no other, that is, he feels 
the need of no other. But when a great grief 



72 The Known Spirit. 

comes to him, he cannot see through it, or his 
way out of it, until God's Spirit so fills it, that it 
becomes translucent, and then a great grief is an 
ineffable peace. 

There are some souls so sensitive and responsive 
to the spiritual, that whilst the memory of a lost 
friend is very vivid and precious to them, they are 
conscious of the presence of the same influence 
which this friend exerted over them before death. 
This is the soul of that which has been universal 
in the most mystical phases of religion — prayer for 
the dead, and prayer to the dead. And this defeats 
the philosophy of modern spiritualism, which inter- 
poses the voice of a stranger between the com- 
munion of two loving and affianced souls. This 
spiritualism is the most unspiritual of all conceivable 
things — so hard, so cold, so chilling, that it usually 
ultimates in the denial of Spirit, or atheism. 

It is the way of the Spirit further never to give 
pain to the pain-bearer. The pain may actually 
remain, but the peace superinduced relieves from 
the sense of it. 



The Known Spirit. 73 

Rubens understood this divine philosophy when 
he painted the crucifixion of St. Peter. The apostle 
is nailed to a cross, head downward, attitude and 
torture doing all they can to bring out the physical 
suffering and agony of the holy man in every limb 
and feature ; and yet there is this infilling peace, 
this expression of triumph, and " the glory which 
excelleth," surmounting the whole man, and so 
dominating the suffering and agony that it does 
seem the cross cannot longer fix him to earth, he 
must be off to God. 

The instant the Son of man came to man in the 
furnace the fire lost its power — its very quality of 
burning was gone. 

And how little we know of the joys of suffering ! 
Sometimes we think that people find pleasure, as 
we say, in being miserable. There are persons so 
situated in life that there is nothing in their out- 
ward circumstances to suggest unhappiness, and yet 
these persons are not happy ; they know the Spirit 
teaches them it will not do to be happy in the 
outward conditions ; so they are usually the most 



74 The Known Spirit. 

miserable, for they have not found out how to be 
happy in God. The knowledge of the Spirit, then, 
conies not by intellection, but by revelation. This 
I have already striven to make plain, not by the 
words of argument, but by the phrases of spiritual 
suggestion. 

When the man has had the revelation, he has 
the knowledge, so that there is no Spirit but the 
Known Spirit. 

The Spirit, as a distinction in the Godhead — 
something having official relations with us, in 
virtue of the official relations of the Son — is a 
figure of speech — in fact, a figment. There is no 
such thing, and if there were, we could know 
nothing of it. We can only know the Spirit as the 
subjective activity of God. We can know nothing 
of that polytheism of which the Spirit is one of the 
Gods. Such a Spirit is a phantom. Such a con- 
ception demands that a man should think the op- 
posite of what he can think — that is, that he 
should think a phantom a reality. 

The most plausible way of stating the doctrine 



The Known Spirit. 75 

of the Trinity is this : " God is a personal being, 
consisting of three persons." And this statement 
in its last analysis is this : Three are one : the 
plural is singular. This is not thinkable ; no in- 
tellect can comprehend this — only superstition can 
accept it. When the superstitions mind holds this 
at all, it is — it must be — with such subjective 
modifications as make it capable of believing it, 
which is equal to not holding it at all. 

I conclude, then, that the Known Spirit is not 
" God the Spirit," of Church theology, but the 
Spirit-God of Christian consciousness. And the 
knowledge of this Spirit no man is left wholly 
without, for Spirit answers to spirit. There is no 
knowledge so real as this : what the spirit of man 
perceives of the Spirit of God, that a man knows 
as he knows nothing else. This is not the rock of 
certitude, but the very ground in which the rock 
itself finds foundation for the whole superstructure 
of the religious life. 

The man who professes not to believe in the 
Spirit ought not to profess to believe in morality 



76 The Known Spirit. 



itself, for morality is nothing other than the Spirit 
speaking. Moral distinctions are the distinctions 
which the Spirit defines. The Spirit says what is 
right and what is wrong — what we ought and 
what we ought not to do. The universal con- 
science of man is the Spirit of God ; or rather, 
conversely stated, the Spirit of God is the universal 
conscience of man. In this the religious Quietists 
have always held the substance of truth ; if duty is 
to be discovered by any process, it is by heeding 
the inner voice ; familiarity with the tones and 
speech of the Spirit is the essence of religion. 

This essence of religion each man must know for 
himself ; the fruits of it we can see in each other, 
like autumn days, whose tints we can describe, 
whose spirit we cannot define. 

The Spirit of God, in reality, dwells everywhere. 
This can be known, however, only under certain 
conditions. We must bring peace, resignation, 
acquiescence, purity to God — all the products of 
the Spirit — if we would have the communion and 
fellowship of the Spirit. 



The Known Spirit. 77 

In other words, the soul must be responsive to 
the voice of God, willing and wanting to hear, and 
to heed its words, before we can feel that we are 
the friends of God. " The Spirit itself must bear 
witness with our spirit that we are the children of 
God." 

These terms, " communion " and " fellowship," 
are the singularly felicitous phrases by which the 
soul's recognition of God and God's recognition of 
the soul are set forth. 

Precious words ! They stand illumined and full 
of illumination, telling of the child's privilege in 
the presence of his Father. 

We cannot see this communion and fellowship, 
but they give us eyes to see even " the excellent 
glory of God." He who knows this, then, can see 
the footprints of the Deity, not only where His 
gracious prodigality has flooded loftier natures with 
genius and faculty, but in the most barren and 
waste places of humanity ; even here eyes are opened 
to see heaven upon the very confines of hell. 

There is one especial direction where it is always 



78 The Known Spirit. 

profitable to meditate upon the fruit of the Spirit. 
We are very accustomed to the sounds of the 
world's conflicts, and this is the more strange when 
we remember the concords of God's own universe 
— how sweetly the machinery of the universe 
works, and this because it works with God, for 
God, and in God. The world we inhabit moves 
on its axis and round its centre as quietly, as peace- 
fully, as a new-born infant sleeps ; and God holds 
it in his heart, just as the mother does her child. 
But the world that inhabits us — how full of dis- 
cordances and inharmonies ! Nations war for clas- 
sification as first or second or third-rate powers, or 
for this or that enlargement of boundaries by this 
or that acquisition of territory. Sects of religion 
are not forges, wherein the spirits of men are 
welded in love together, but rather arsenals, where 
weapons of warfare are in process of making — 
weapons of words — cold, deatlrful words of theo- 
logic creeds, which divide brothers into armies, not 
to fight all enemies of humanity, but each other. 
It is sacrilege — oh ! so heinous — when this war- 



The Known Spirit. 79 

fare is carried on in the name of that Spirit whose 
fruit is peace. The Spirit leads to unities, not 
divergences. It gathers, not to scatter abroad. It 
gives liberty to think; for "where the Spirit of 
the Lord is, there is liberty." But of this sense 
of liberty is born peace. There is, too, a higher, 
truer peace of the Spirit than mere outward agree- 
ment ; it is the repose of the spirit of man in the 
Spirit of God — the very peace Jesus had, and 
which, without assumption or the seeming of it, he 
had to give to men. The peace of God, which 
passeth all understanding, was the peace the Mas- 
ter gave to his disciples — gives to his disciples. 

And what though it pass the understanding of 
it ! What though the intellect is ever lagging 
behind the realization, and only catches glimpses 
of partial outlines fading away in the infinite ! To 
unfold the highest mystery of life to the spirit of 
man, Jesus justified faith in it by suffering and 
pain, and by the beauty of his life, born of the 
suffering, and the pain, and the mystery. 



80 TJie Known Spirit. 

" One heart beats in all nature, differing, 
But in the work it works ; its doubts and clamors 
Are but the waste and brunt of instruments, 
Wherewith a work is done." 

The Spirit that cradles the universe in its heart, 
and whose smiles, as over an infant, are the stream- 
ing tints of purple and azure and gold which play 
over the features of the heavens as the sun goes to 
rest, will hold us as dearly while we live, speak to 
us when we ask, and, when our mortal lips can no 
longer ask, will give us in death infinitely more 
than we could think in life. 



IV 



6 



THE RIGHT RELIGION 



Like a blind spinner, in the sun 

I tread my days ; 
I know that all the threads will run 

Appointed waj x s ; 
I know each day will bring its task, 
And, being blind, no more I ask. 

I do not know the use or name 

Of that I spin ; 
I only know that some one came 

And laid within 
My hand the thread, and said, "Since you 
Are blind, but one thing you can do." 

Sometimes the threads, so rough and fast 

And tangled, fly ; 
I know wild storms are sweeping past, 

And fear that I 
Shall fall ; but dare not try to find 
A safer place, since I am blind. 

I know not why, but I am sure 

That tint and place, 
In some great fabric to endure 

Past time and race, 
My threads will have ; so from the first, 
Though blind, I never felt accursed. 



I think perhaps this trust hath sprung 

From one short word 
Said over me when I was young, — 

So young I heard 
It, knowing not that God's name signed 
My brow and sealed me his though blind. 

But whether this be seal or sign 

Within, without, 
It matters not ; the Lord divine 

I never doubt. 
I know he set me here, and still, 
And glad, and blind, I wait his will. 

But listen, listen, day by day, 

To hear their tread 
Who bear the finished web away, 

And cut the thread, 
And bring God's message in the sun, 
u Thou poor, blind spinner, work is done." 

H. H. 





ELTGION is essentially one, and in its 
substance cannot be two or three, any 
more than light can be two or three, or 
truth can be two or three ; the light may be modi- 
fied by its mediums, " for there is one glory of the 
sun, and another glory of the moon, and another 
glory of the stars ; for one star differeth from 
another star in glory : ' but withal, the light is 
one. 

The prism reveals the elements of light, its con- 
stituents of colour, or light seen in its separations ; 
but light is one : one in sun, moon, star, or the 
translucent precious stone. 

Facts frequently modify our human apprehensions 
of truth ; there is Greek truth, Roman truth, and 



88 The Right Religion. 

Anglican truth, yet these are after all not the truth 
but modifications of the truth : truth is appre- 
hended through the eyes of climates, educations, 
and traditions. 

An old Hebrew begins to read his Scriptures, in 
an outward way, where the Christian leaves off. 
To the Christian the Hebrew begins at the end of 
his Bible to read through it ; to the Hebrew the 
Christian does the same thing. The right way to 
the Hebrew is his way ; the right way to the 
Christian is his way. 

The savage man has one conception of beauty ; 
the civilized man has another ; each is right to 
each. When man was in a mere state of nature 
his god was a nature-god, a personification of 
natural forces. 

When man began to inhabit houses, then he 
began to build temples for his God. 

Man has always felt and said, that which is fitting 
for man is fitting for God. 

The Homeric gods eat and drink, because, in the 
times of Homer, eating and drinking were divine 



The Right Religion. 89 



pleasures. Zeus is the strongest of the gods, be- 
cause strength was glorious and divine. 

The ancient Germans were the most warlike 
people, so their supreme god was Odin the god of 
war. The Greeks and Romans came finally to deify 
accidents, passions, virtues. 

Man's highest conception of himself is God. 
Man, however, feels his limitations ; he projects 
himself into objectivity, and predicates of this 
objective self-infinitude the absence of all restric- 
tions and limitations, and this is God. This is the 
best man can do — this is all he can do. 

The Western nations have westernized Christi- 
anitv : some believe to its betterment, some think 
to its detriment. 

But of this transformation we cannot predicate 
right or wrong, better or worse, for religion must 
be not only in harmony with man's nature, but it 
must comport with zone and climate — with the 
rigid north or the genial south — with perpetual 
winter or perennial summer : with the dominance of 
the materialistic or the dominance of the spiritual- 



90 The Right Religion. 

istic. Christianity is universal, and yet the history 
of Christianity proves that wherever it has planted 
its foot it has been modified by the earth it touched. 
Some forms of life die when transplanted to un- 
congenial soils ; some trees and flowers lose their 
identity by the new conditions of earth and mois- 
ture and temperature. The wide-leafed tree of the 
tropics — each leaf so full of the abundance of sun- 
shine — huddles itself together to keep warm in 
our colder climate. • 

Religion, so self-adequate in the East, becomes 
organized in the West ; that which is self-support- 
ing in the one becomes mutually supporting in the 
other. Man becomes the measure of all things to 
himself. 

A Brahmin knows the first half of the great 
commandment, and but little of the second. An 
Englishman knows the last half better than the 
first. A Brahmin can love God without loving his 

* 

neighbour ; an Englishman can love his neighbour 
without loving God. 

The first, self-supporting, cannot enter into all 



The Right Religion. 91 

the organized forms of mutual helpfulness ; the 
second, mutually supporting, cannot reach up to 
God without the love and help of his neighbour. 

The Western mind makes sad havoc of the most 
spiritual sayings of Jesus. The beautiful words of 
the Master, " I and the Father are one," have been 
a strong proof-text of a physical, corporeal trinity. 
Put upon the plane of the material, it has got 
into the mathematical absurdity, that one thing is 
another thing — that Jesus meant to say that he 
was God and that God was himself ; but once when 
a Christian missionary read these precious words 
to an old devoted Brahmin, he said, " Why, Jesus 
was a good Brahmin." He intuitively caught the 
spiritual import of the inspiring and encouraging 
words. 

So, then, I conclude that truth is a term of 
metaphysics, and that right is a term of ethics. 

In the abstract, there is but one true religion and 
many right religions ; in the concrete, there is but 
one right religion and many true religions. 

The truth of religion is the harmony between the 



92 The Right Religion. 

conception of the man and the reality of the fact ; 
the right of religion is the agreement between the 
conception of the man and the conduct of his life ; 
so that, whilst the truth of religion may be a sub- 
ject of proper and profitable speculation, the right 
of religion demands conscientious endeavour and 
practice. The one is a matter of the intellect's 
pleasure, the other is a matter of the man's practice ; 
the one has its seat in the reason, the other has its 
seat in the conscience. We have to do properly 
enough with both. We are morally accountable to 
God only for the last — the right of religion. A 
vital mistake at this point has been the foundation 
of all religious bigotry, exclusiveness, intolerance, 
and iniquities. 

No one historic religion can claim to be the 
true religion ; each may claim to be the right re- 
ligion. He is the real atheist who denies love, 
justice, mercy, not he who denies that there is a 
God of love, justice, mercy. A man who believes 
in these believes in God, whether he will or not: 
he who denies these, though he assert faith in 



The Right Religion. 93 

God with all the vocabulary of the Creeds, is an 
atheist. 

He is not an infidel, who does not believe in sym- 
pathy, denial, and vicariousness ; but who in his life 
fails to practise them. He is a Christian who has 
faith in these, though he deny the person Christ ; 
for to have faith in these, is to have the faith of 
Christ. A man may not know where the fruit 
grows which he eats, and the substance of which 
gives him sustenance and joy ; but he knows his 
food who gives his strength to the God who nour- 
ished the fruit-tree, and to his brother who is also 
the offspring of God. 

Then it concerns us particularly to inquire 
whether our religion be right rather than whether 
it be true. Indeed I am not prepared to say that 
in this world we shall ever arrive at a definition 
of true religion. Metaphysics is an expanding 
science ; ethics an exacting one. The growth of 
intellect and its culture will probably take away 
from our speculations all of its so-called solid bases, 
and that which to our reasoning is true to-day may 



94 The Right Religion. 

be false to-morrow. " Take away from the Greek 
the quality of being Greek, and you take away his 
existence." Just as involuntarily and necessarily 
as a Greek is a Greek, so involuntarily and neces- 
sarily his gods are Greek. 

There was a time when Jupiter was as true to 
the Heathen, as Jesus is real to the Christian. He 
took no offence at the nature of Jupiter. It was 
Ms nature. " To every religion the gods of other 
religions are only notions concerning God, but its 
own conception of God is to it God Himself ; the 
true God — such as He is in Himself." 

The truth in religion is movable, the right of 
religion is stationary ; what yesterday was true in 
religion to-day is sensualism ; what is atheism to- 
day will be true in religion to-morrow. I do not 
affirm that we know no more of the truth of religion 
and in religion to-day than }^esterclay. I believe 
we shall know more to-morrow than to-day. 

Things in religion were true once which are 
qualitatively untrue now. Many dogmas which 
were current coin half a century ago are counted 



The Right Religion. 95 

spurious to-day. Indeed few of the views of re- 
ligion prevalent then have any hold whatever upon 
the popular consciousness now, certainly none upon 
the culture and thinking of our time. 

There is an antithesis between history and reason. 
Mankind was capable of receiving a statement of 
religion at one time which it is intellectually in- 
capable of holding at another and an advanced 
time. 

The Bible itself has the valuable merit of contain- 
ing whatever the interpreter wishes to say. This 
is true of the scriptures of all religions, and it is 
most likely that it is this universal and indefinite 
element in the religious books of all nations that 
makes them Sacred Scriptures. Science had hard 
work to make the world believe that the form of 
the earth is spherical, because man in honesty 
supposed the Bible revealed its surface to be flat. 
Even theology now compels the Bible to be on good 
terms with the results of scientific inquiry. 

In our youth we had no other idea of the proc- 
esses and time of creation than that the whole was 



96 The Right Religion. 

finished in six clays ; but now the veracity of the 
Bible is made to hold on its way, although we may 
be convinced that to bring the world to its present 
form and structure, may have required six million 
years. 

The old theologians said, that the essential attri- 
butes of God were made manifest by the light of 
the natural reason, but the Trinity could only be 
known by revelation. This they had to say, be- 
cause the theological Trinity contradicts the nat- 
ural reason. 

But, in reality when it is said an idea comes to 
us by revelation, it is simply meant it comes to us 
by tradition. The tradition of one age is the rev- 
elation of another. 

The revelations of the Bible are as changeful, 
therefore, as human opinions and prejudices. And 
it is a wonderful book in this, that it throws illu- 
mination both wavs, backwards and forwards. It 
is so universal in its spirit, its very language suits 
the thoughts of all ages. 

But when we pass from the metaphysical specula- 



The Right Religion. 97 

tions about truths of religion, to contemplate and 
consider the ethical duties of religion, we are left 
to no such doubts, dealings, and uncertainties. 

Here we are compelled to allow each man to 
settle for himself the value of scriptures, revelations, 
traditions, sacraments, rites, and forms of worship. 
His religion is right whose religion rights itself 
with his own soul and God. 

If a man be a Brahmin by the law of his con- 
science, he must be a Brahmin by the course of 
his conduct, if he would have the right religion, 
although Christianity may be a truer religion than 
Brahminism. 

To be the votary of one sect in conscience, and of 
another by affiliation, involves a form of dishonesty 
and insincerity, detrimental to, if not destructive of, 
the highest, truest, sweetest, religious life. 

Only that religion, furthermore, is right, which 
by its contents satisfies the subject of it, answers 
to his conscience, his ideals, his wants. It may be 
less true or more true than another, but if it con- 
sciously and well serves these ends, it is essentially 

7 



98 The Right Religion. 

right. A man knows when he is clothed and fed, 
though he may be ignorant of the texture of his 
garments and the constituents of his food. 

Any religion which stretches out its helping 
hands, and says, " Come unto Me all ye that labor 
and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," and 
fulfils to the heart the promise to the ear, is the 
right religion. 

Being a law unto himself, one should be careful 
how he insists upon being a law to other people. 
We find the secret of life in the law of Jesus 
Christ, but each man must be left free to interpret 
this law for himself. 

Happy he who finds in his own soul the rest of 
Christ's soul. He may come to this through cathe- 
dral ceremonials, or in the caverns of the earth. 
The Spirit of God has an easy way of finding men 
out and rising up like a great mountain to keep off 
the wintry blasts from their souls. 

There is a rest at the very heart of the universe, 
which distils itself as morning dew upon the thirsty 
heart of humanity. It quickens in this soil, and 



The Right Religion. 99 

the fruit is of the seed after its own kind and 
fashion. They who eat of this fruit find the prom- 
ised rest. 

Justice, mercy, humility, these are religion. Jus- 
tice puts us on an equal footing with all. Mercy 
lifts the lowliest to an equal footing with ourselves. 
Humility teaches us there is no condescension in 
God, when He chooses man for a companion. 

Religion, which is the avowal of the heart, to 
itself, of its re-allegiance to its God, is right when 
it tests its loyalty by patriotism to humanity. 



THE SURE HELL 



" In a valley, centuries ago, 

Grew a little fern leaf, green and slender — 
Veining delicate, and fibres tender — 
Waving, when the wind crept down so low ; 

Rushes tall, and moss, and grass grew round it, 
Playful sunbeams darted in and found it, 
Drops of dew stole in, by night, and crowned it, 
But no foot of man e'er trod that way; 
Earth was young, and keeping holiday. 

Monster fishes swam the silent main, 

Stately forests waved their giant branches, 
Mountains hurled their snowy avalanches, 

Mammoth creatures stalked across the plain: 
Nature revelled in grand mysteries, 
But the little fern was not of these, 
Did not number with the hills and trees ; 
Only grew and waved, its sweet wild way, 
No one came to note it, day by day. 

Earth, one time, put on a frolic mood, 

Heaved the rocks, and changed the mighty motion 

Of the deep, strong currents of the ocean, 
Moved the plain, and shook the haughty wood, 

Crushed the little fern in soft, moist clay, 

Covered it, and hid it safe away; 

Oh, the long, long centuries since that day! 

Oh, the agony! Oh, life's bitter cost, 

Since that useless little fern was lost ! 



Useless? Lost? There came a thoughtful man, 
Searching Nature's secrets, far and deep; 
From a fissure in a rocky steep 

He withdrew a stone, o'er which there ran 
Fairy pencillings, a quaint design, 
Veinings, leafage, fibres clear and fine, 
And the fern's life lay in every line! 
So, I think, God hides some souls away, 
Sweetly to surprise us, the last day." 





HERE is one point of agreement in all 
systems of religion ; namely, that suffer- 
ing is the sequence of sin. All wrong- 
doing does not bring pain and remorse, however ; 
for the moral quality of an act takes its character 
sometimes from a century, sometimes from climate, 
sometimes from conventionalism ; yet there is in all 
centuries, climates, conventionalisms — that is in 
all civilizations — a standard of ethics, a law of 
right and wrong. This law may be a supposed 
revelation from God, or the edict of some vicege- 
rent of God, or the monition of the conscience. 
Each man possessed of the sanity of accountability 
has a law of morality ; to live in accordance with 
its approvals is to live righteously, to be brought 
under the voice of its condemnations is to live 
sinfully. 



108 The Sure Hell. 



The same act may have an unlike moral charac- 
ter to different minds, the result of dissimilar edu- 
cations. Notwithstanding this, it is always and 
everywhere right to do right, and wrong to do 
wrong ; so every volitional act refers itself to a 
standard which determines it to be right or wrong. 
The wrong act brings pain, the right act brings 
peace. 

There is no relief to the transgressor in the 
persuasion that there are no abstract and absolute 
moral distinctions, or that these are only the yokes 
of kingcraft and priestcraft ; for if morality is re- 
solved into utilitarianism, then that is right which 
is best, which is only exchanging one ground for 
another, the ought of the conscience for the ought 
of the conventionalism. 

Society must determine what is best for itself, 
and the individual must conform to its dictates. 
Although we may persuade ourselves that moral 
distinctions are not abstract and absolute, we can- 
not persuade ourselves that they are unreal. For 
morality is as real as the consciousness of God; 



The Sure Hell. 109 



indeed, it is the creature of this belief in God. The 
two are identical in conception ; when the mind 
refers itself to God, it refers itself to an ideal stand- 
ard of morality. The need of the soul that brings 
God into it is the same that craves the approval 
and peace of God, and shuns his condemnation and 
displeasure. There is then no process by which the 
reality of the ethical idea can be abrogated and 
annulled. That philosophy which says, " Let us 
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," counts eating 
and drinking its chief good, and so right : it accepts 
all the consequences of this course of life, as pref- 
erable to the consequences of an opposite course. 

But even this philosophy does not hope to escape 
consequences. When man accepts one theory of 
life, and comports his conduct with another, mor- 
ality is a law of bondage to him, it limits him, 
walls him in, and involves him in a web of entan- 
glement ; he breaks one chain to find he is bound 
by another ; he is the subject of conscious spiritual 
anarchy, and he wears himself out in reproaches 
and remorses which take the sweetness out of all 



110 The Sure Hell 



life's roses, and turn to bitterness on his tongue 
every delight. This man is unreconciled to him- 
self. He begins the effort to get rid of the ideal 
standard, but this is now utterly impossible, for if 
it no longer reminds him, it never ceases to haunt 
him. It may be too indefinite to be called an 
image, but it is certainly real enough to be called a 
spectre. If it does not work conformity, or contri- 
tion, then condemnation. When we have found 
and affirmed the antithesis between the standard 
of the conscience and the rule of conduct, we have 
indicated the first element of the hell-idea. God 
is in harmony with himself ; man to be like God 
must be in harmony not only with God, but with 
himself, in accordance with his circumstances and 
his nature. The free issue of his soul must be seen 
in free action ; that is, his delight must be in the 
law of his own being. In looking upon the course 
of a beautiful river, it never occurs to us that the 
waters are offended and rebellious because it is 
their nature so ceaselessly to flow on and flow on 
ceaselessly in one path. 



The Sure Hell. Ill 



The exceeding glory of the river is that it is in 
harmony with its own nature and God's nature, 
and so completely in accord with its own impelling 
power and destiny. 

The violet comes up, not repining that it came 
no sooner, or was not allowed to continue folded 
so warmly in the love of the earth, but feeds upon 
the sunshine and moisture as its appointed way 
of getting and giving life. The pious little flower 
rejoices in its own law, and so delights itself in the 
law; of the Lord. 

When man breaks this order of being, feels the 
inherent law of harmony at variance with the law 
of his own desires and appetites, — wills one way 
and acts another, — he separates himself from the 
universal law, is thrown off from his own harmony ; 
the harmony of law and God, and so is in the outer 
darkness of rebellion and discord. 

The impassable gulf, however, between heaven 
and hell is not the distance between purity and sin, 
but between penitence and impenitence. 

Heaven is that estate of the man where purity is 



112 The Sure Hell. 

loved and sin detested : hell is that condition of the 
soul where purity is detested, and sin is loved. 
The fact that the universal conscience approves of 
the right, and disapproves of the wrong, is the 
pledge of the normality of virtue ; that purity is the 
natural condition of man, that man is best off, and 
only well off, when in spiritual accord with his own 
nature, — to know this, to feel this, until it begets 
serious strivings and earnest endeavours, is heaven ; 
to know this, and feel this, and rebel against it, 
hate the right, revel in the impure, is hell. 

Man, then, in the state of nature — I mean, of 
course, man when most natural, most like himself 
— most like, not this individual or that individual, 
but most like the ideal humanity — is in the state of 
grace nearest to God, most surrounded by heaven. 

The last born infant, just from God, is the new- 
est revelation from God, the new testament of his 
love and favour, the renewed testimony of his immi- 
nence. 

The further removed from the centre and con- 
cord, the more conscious of a law of the flesh war- 



The Sure Hell. . 113 



ring against the law of the Spirit. To be content in 
the warfare is hell. This is simply preferring spirit- 
ual chaos to spiritual cosmos, with no sighings and 
seekings for the conforming Spirit of God. No 
penitence or contrition because of the darkness 
which hides God from the spirit, no regret at the 
presence of the demon of discord — this is hell. 
Hell, then, is not that state of intellectual confusion 
which calls good evil, and evil good, but that state 
of moral obtuseness which loves evil rather than 
good, and darkness rather than light. The regret 
is not for the sin, but because of the law which 
makes it sin. The sorrow works toward God, not 
toward the man. 

The sense of God's presence in the soul is not 
only heaven then, but it is also hell. 

This presence man both seeks and shuns : when 
the sense of God is in the heart through the seek- 
ing, it is heaven ; when there through the shunning, 
it is hell. There are images and memories which 
remain in the mind by the very effort of the mind 
to get rid of them. The mind knows, probably, no 

8 



114 The Sure Hell. 



such torture as this. The man may not always be 
cognizant of God's presence, but the very fact of 
the effort to get rid of it demonstrates the con- 
sciousness of it. And God is not the obedient 
slave of man's will ; He will not be drawn out of 
His own temple. Man may ruthlessly, with icono- 
clastic intent, break every symbol and image of the 
living God in his own heart, but the vestal lamp 
still burns so brightly that hidden sin is discovered, 
and the excellent glory of God is revealed. To 
behold sin in juxtaposition with God, to choose sin 
and refuse God, to love the deformity, and hate 
the perfection, — this is hell. When the demons 
of the soul cry out, " Thou Son of the living God, 
leave us alone," then hell has entered in and taken 
possession of the man. 

Now, if it could be, if it were spiritually possi- 
ble, for the soul to realize that this estate, self- 
chosen, could become normal and natural, that God 
would go out and stay out, and leave* him to his 
own moral affinities and delights in this world or 
in eternity, — then the sinner would have gained his 



The Sure Hell 115 



end, and the mastery over the laws of the moral 
universe and God. Then, for him, hell would be 
heaven. But this conception, so prevalent, is mon- 
strously absurd. Hell is hell because in it there is 
an open way to heaven. Because God's Spirit is 
even there ! — there to accuse of shame, and to en- 
treat — there to renew offers of mercy, forgiveness, 
and saving help. Not to impose these, but to proffer 
them. Hell is where something better may be at- 
tained — where effort is possible. We have been 
taught to believe that hell is a refuge for the will- 
less, whereas such a refuge would be their heaven. 

No, the constraining love of God gives the rebel- 
lious child no refuge from the torturing conscience, 
though he make his bed in hell. This is the " worm 
that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched." 

Hell is just that juncture, whether in time or in 
eternity, that confluence of certainty and realization, 
in this world or in the next, where the soul has set- 
tled it that it must repent, and yet hates the tears 
and sobbings of contrition. Postponement is hell ; 
something must be done, yet the doing is deferred. 



116 The Sure Hell. 



There is in this association of ideas one that 
contravenes the pompons dogmatism so prevalent 
in theologic speculation, namely, that hell is vin- 
dictive punishment ; for it illumines the truth of 
spiritual sequence so unmistakably and grandly 
that God no longer is covered in hideous darkness, 
the righteousness of his moral government is no 
longer called into question when it is made so 
palpably plain, that only an unvindictive hell is, in 
reality, hell at all. 

A vindictive hell is a fancied vision of vindictive 
priestcraft. The subject of such a hell would then 
be guiltless. He could no longer feel that he is 
the wrong-doer, but God is the wrong-doer. He 
may still have the recollection of his wrong-doings, 
but he only did in his lifetime what God is doing 
in eternity. 

There can be nothing revengeful in God, or in 
nature, or in morals. These hell-spectres are only 
the phantoms of bad men's brains, and I am per- 
suaded they are only the endeavours of men to get 
rid of the inevitable hell, which pursues and enfolds 



The Sure Hell. 117 



the wrong-doer until he consents to turn to God 
. and live. 

If the Scriptures of our religion should contain 
never so many separate and isolated passages, stat- 
ing in the most unmistakable language that man is 
liable to endless punishment for his misconduct in 
this life, then I frankly confess the sincere and 
reverential believer would be morally bound to ac- 
cept one of two alternatives : either to insist that 
these texts of the Scriptures must be interpreted to 
harmonize with the revelation of God's infinite love 
and man's original sense of justice, which would 
virtually be taking all meaning out of them ; or, 
secondly, to deny unequivocally the truth of their 
statement, which would be nothing more than the 
reason of one man set up in candour and reverence 
against the opinion of other men. 

If I am now told I do not believe in the Bible, I 
answer, the first tenet of my creed, as I learn it from 
all Bibles, is not "I believe in hell," but "I believe 
in God ; " and hell must be explained by my faith 
in God, and not God explained by my faith in hell. 



118 The Sure Hell 



It is incredible that a man, both devout towards 
God and sincere towards himself, should even ac- 
cept the possibility of man's continuing eternally a 
sinner, and in the hell of sin, or hold to the pre- 
posterous theory that eternity is, in the Divine 
economy, only a vindication of time. 

The moral structure of the human mind makes 
it impossible to contemplate any such issue of life. 
To accept it is possible, to conceive it impossible. 
Men who do right because they fear to do wrong, 
fear not hell, but exposure ; they acknowledge to 
themselves, not accountability to God, but to so- 
ciety. Man, indeed, cannot do right because he 
fears to do wrong, for in this attempt the quality 
of hypocrisy enters in to destroy absolutely all 
quality of virtue. 

Nowhere in God's limitless space or infinite time 
is suffering the dreadful thing, but sinning. It is 
only the exceeding sinfulness of sin which is seen 
in suffering ; suffering tells the tale of sinning. 

It is horrible to believe that, for the sake of the 
suffering, the sinning is eternal ! 



The Sure Hell. 119 



No ; the last soul must repent at last, and repent 
that lie did not repent before. 

One holy, helpful man said he lived upon the 
confines of hell to be near heaven. 

This is the very heart of our philosophy — the 
highest heaven adjoins the deepest hell. He who 
toils amongst the lowest is himself the highest. 
He who has greatest faith in the most depraved has 
greatest faith in the most divine. 

Dear God! how sweet heaven will be to Thee 
when all Thy children get home ! 

God will not for ever carry the pains and griefs 
that pierce and burden the hearts of his little ones. 
To this release He works with them, and for them, 
and in them ; and this shall be an effectual working 
unto life. God's universe is His New Jerusalem, 
and its streets shall be searched until the last lost 
jewel is found. The Father knows the names of all 
His children, and when the feast of the First-born 
is celebrated, all shall have heard the call and come 
home. 



VI 



THE TRUE HEAVEN 



I cannot think but God must know 
About the thing I long for so; 
I know He is so good, so kind, 
I cannot think but He will find 
Some way to help, some way to show 
Me to the thing I long for so. 

I stretch my hand — it lies so near ; 

It looks so sweet, it looks so dear. 

" Dear Lord," I pray, " Oh, let me know 

If it is wrong to want it so ? " 

He only smiles — He does not speak: 

My heart grows weaker and more weak, 

With looking at the thing so dear, 

Which lies so far, and yet so near. 

Now, Lord, I leave at thy loved feet 
This thing which looks so near, so sweet; 
I will not seek, I will not long — 
I almost fear I have been wrong. 
I'll go, and work the harder, Lord, 
And wait till by some loud, clear word 
Thou callest me to thy loved feet, 
To take this thing so dear, so sweet. 

Saxe Holm. 




HAT which was personal to himself Jesus 
made universal to humanity. He saw the 
race in himself, rather than himself in 
the race. He became in himself the standard of 
humanity, not humanity the standard of himself. 
This is all the meaning there is in the miraculous 
birth of Christ. All men spiritually have been 
born into humanity, humanity spiritually was born 
into Christ. 

He felt that humanity should be what he was, 
whereas all other men have felt they should strive 
for the ideal humanity. 

He was, then, the realization of the desire of 
nations. This is miraculous in this, that it has 
occurred but once ; not that it may not occur again, 
not that it is contrary to the laws of Nature and 



128 The True Heaven. 

life that it should occur a thousand times in the 
future. For aught we know, this may be the truest 
and deepest law of God and Nature, and, because 
so profound, it has enacted itself, so far as we know, 
only once in the history of humanity. 

When the time comes that this shall be the cus- 
tom, and not the exception, this term miraculous 
will have lost its import, for this is all the mean- 
ing it has. Nature is one, and cannot be divided ; 
we get one aspect of Nature in one century, another 
aspect in another century ; but her essence cannot 
be two. She stretches out her hand in one century 
and creates man. She reveals her face in another 
to bless man. 

Christ fulfilled in himself his own conception of 
himself, and it was this harmony of the ideal and 
actual that made him the revelation of God to man, 
and the revelation of man to God. He brought 
God and futurity into humanity and time : into our 
homes, workshops, and experiences. He affirmed 
the immortality of all men, upon the basis of the 
Spirit's affirmation of immortality in himself. 



The True Heaven. 129 

This became the essentiality of his life, which he 
referred to all lives. He made universal a con- 
sciousness which was personal to himself. 

He said all men are immortal, because he felt he 
was immortal. * 

His affirmation, then, was based upon an assump- 
tion. He applied to all men that which he knew 
of himself. He affirmed of the genus humanity 
what he knew of the personal man. This man was 
the best and most perfect of the species, and it is 
the very genius of spiritual faith to affirm of all 
that which we can affirm of the highest type. 

Personal immortality was fundamental to no 
ancient system of philosophy ; among the heathen 
it had only the significance of a subjective concep- 
tion, and this conception was vague, confused, and 
contradictory. 

Plato unmistakably taught the immortality of the 

race — on this wise, and in these words : " The 

human race, then, is interlinked with all time, 

which follows and will follow it to the end, being in 

this way immortal ; inasmuch as leaving children's 

9 



130 The True Heaven. 

children, and being one and the same by generation, 
it partakes of immortality." 

It is foreign to my purpose to appreciate Jesus, 
by depreciating Plato, or to rest in the testimony of 
either, when reporting upon matters which pertain 
to Spirit and futurity. I simply quote the Greek 
as adding confirmation to the Hebrew. He be- 
lieved what the other knew. 

A landscape is the more beautiful that we have 
seen it in its two aspects, when in dimness and un- 
certainty, by the haziness about it ; and when in 
full revelation that all mist is dispelled. Plato 
was the morning of faith, Jesus its noon-day. Im- 
mortality was the obvious inference of Christ's own 
consciousness. We believe in goodness by believing 
in men. Christ begets faith in purity, and to get 
very near to Christ is to make very clear immor- 
tality to the spirit's comprehension. For the con- 
sciousness of God in the soul is the pledge of 
heaven. That nature which responds to God is 
that which is peculiarly certain that it is unsuited to 
attain its highest development in this life. Through 



The True Heaven. 131 

this, man is akin to God, and in this nature of man 
is lodged the assurance of immortality ; in most 
men it may not assume the strength of demonstra- 
tion, rather only a glimmer of futurity thrown back 
from God into the soul of his child, and strength- 
ened as the child lays hold on it, and works with it 
and by it. The light of eternity lies in the heart ; 
by it man sees a little way, if not far into the future. 
When tins light becomes the soul's illumination, 
and through it the soul becomes translucent, the 
future is now and now is the future. The wall of 
partition is broken down, and there is no such 
thing as a distinction in time — none in immortality. 
This is eternity, this is heaven ; eternity is all time, 
heaven is everywhere. 

The Brahmin confuses two conceptions which 
the Christian keeps separate, the God-life and the 
immortal life — that the spirit, having emanated 
from God, never finds its equilibrium and poise, its 
content and rest, until restored back to God : not 
in the Christian sense of spiritual affiance, but the 
philosophic sense of spiritual identity, so that 



132 The True Heaven. 

immortality becomes tlie essence of God, or rather 
God is immortality. Personal immortality is the 
endless maintenance of the personal identity. And 
we are instructed, in this by the very need of it ; 
without this friendship is a dream, and love a 
delusion. 

A little grave is often heaven's open way to a 
mother's heart, and the spirit-life of her child is as 
real and unquestioned as was the earth-life. Once 
her heart was the home of the child. Now her 
child is the home of her heart. Distance — no ; 
separation — no, not even that ; but dimmed vision 
has not broken love, but cemented it, as the loss 
of one faculty sharpens another. 

Friendships begin to grow here which must have 
eternity in which to mature. 

Men begin to redeem themselves here, giving 
promise and pledge to themselves of something 
better than they have been ; the tendrils of their 
souls begin to cling up to the invisible presence of 
God, turn from the dampness and darkness of sin to 
the warmth and sunshine of God. And fate shall 



The True Heaven. 133 

not mock the very springs of this new life, but shall 
fulfil in the reality the promise to the heart. Man is 
immortal, because man believes it best he should be. 

Nothing that has ever been said about heaven 
can greatly help man to faith in it. 

This is the unfolding of man's own life — it 
flowers into immortality. By day and by night, by 
visions and by dreams, by joys and by sorrows, 
through all these by the unfolding of his own nat- 
ure, his own immortality becomes an assurance to 
himself. 

Man emphasizes eternity, just as eternity em- 
phasizes man ; he dwells in the future just as the 
future dwells in him. " He that loveth not God 
knoweth not God." 

The logic and order are reversed ; knowledge 
comes of love, not love of knowledge. Tears of 
penitence give sight of purity. The pure in heart 
see God. When there is struggle between intellect 
and feeling to gain this, he who keeps possession 
of the field wins. The demands of intellection, 
when they are exacting, surrender finally to the 



134 The True Heaven. 

behests of aspiration ; what the spirit sees, it sees 
with greater certainty and precision than the in 
tellect. Reason may doubt the report of the spirit, 
but must not deny, for in time the lagging critical 
faculty will see what the diviner and primal con- 
sciousness affirms. 

There is no contradiction between music and 
language. It is the function of the one to express 
sentiment, of the other to express thought. 

These frequently cross paths, and usurp each the 
other's calling and faculty ; but language must not 
envy music, nor music envy language — we must 
accept the testimony of both. The purposes of 
language are the more ordinary, of music the more 
exceptional. 

The intellect can say what it cannot sing, the 
spirit can sing what it cannot say. Whether is the 
diviner, the speech or the song, must probably 
depend upon the responsiveness of the listener, 
and " to him that hath shall be given." Most of 
us feel that the requiem has a higher meaning than 
the oration. 



The True Heaven. 135 

Speculation has deferred the reappearing of the 
Lord ; indeed has transposed the very words of the 
Spirit, which are that we are to tarry for his coming 
again, into, he is to tarry for our appearing. 

The vision of the New Jerusalem was not that of 
an ascending city, but a descending city. The voice 
out of heaven said, "Behold, the tabernacle of God 
is with men, and He will dwell with them." 

The apocalypse closes with heaven upon earth, 
not earth transported to heaven. The holy city, 
clothed with the glory of God, is descending in 
answer to the universal prayer men have been 
offering up all these ages, mistaking its words and 
knowing not its answer, " Thy kingdom come, Thy 
will be done on earth." 

Heaven is not locality, except that every point of 
space is heaven, where God's will is the law of life. 

Everywhere in the universe, a willing child in 
the arms of the loving Father is heaven. And 
where else can the child find rest? 

The securities of Church and sacrament are 
worthless. The idle vagaries of psalm-singing and 



136 The True Heaven. 

star-gazing around the throne of God are delusions ; 
— nursery tales suited to the imaginations of chil- 
dren, and the superstitions of credulity. 

Heaven, as a place of aimless idleness and in- 
tolerable vanity, accepted as a reward and held as a 
bounty, happy in the sense of escape while gazing 
into a hell of misery — is the device of the same 
bigotry which has not learned that respectable sel- 
fishness is worse than ignorant indulgence. 

The redeemed spirit could find no heaven whilst 
a brother spirit was in hell, save the heaven which 
would fill and glorify his soul in the endeavour to 
rescue the wanderer. 

He who would enter such a theologic heaven as 
these conspirators against humanity have surveyed, 
'and to which only they themselves have the deed, 
is himself far from the Kingdom. He has broken 
faith with the Mystic Brotherhood. The signet of 
the Divine Knighthood is sacrifice. Its chivalry 
would bear it to the gates of hell, and there demand 
admittance to rescue a comrade. Heaven cannot 
be satisfied till hell has surrendered up its last lost 



The True Heaven. 137 

child. He who seeks heaven may find it. Every 
childless mother who hears the cough of a mother- 
less child and takes its sickness upon her own heart, 
and presses her heart against the little cough until 
it is gone, as if by magic, has entered in and is at 
rest. The man who teaches the ragged class in 
Sunday School only once, and sees they are clothed 
and warmed for the next time, has entered the open 
way to life. The heart of God is the universal 
heart of humanity ; get near to one, and we get 
near to the other. The only angels of which we 
know any thing are the angels of living children. 
" Take heed that ye despise not one of these little 
ones ; for I say unto you, that in heaven their 
angels do always 'behold the face of my Father 
which is in heaven." 

How near we are to heaven in the faith that 
heaven is so near to us ! 

The odours of the orange-grove are wafted to us 
before we enter it. We cannot mistake the prox- 
imity of heaven, the air is so heavenly. 

And the volume of the Book of Life shall have 



138 TJie True Heaven. 

no seal upon it — all may know that the names of 
all are written therein. 

The gates of the descending city shall not be 
shut at all — open until the last and farthest away 
has come in. 

And then not shut ; even the sign of exclusion 
shall not be about it. 




Cambridge: Press of John Wilson & Son. 




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